Category Archives: Architecture

The Valpelline Bivouac – an alpine shelter on a rocky peak in Italy’s Morion ridge – prefabricated offsite and dropped into place by helicopter.

Made from composite wooden panels and steel, anchored to the rock by cables, it offers a base for climbers trekking over the ridge, with cooking facilities, storage and stunning views of Becca di Luseney, Monte Rosa, and the Matterhorn.

Behold: Residence 950 – a 9,500 square foot home in San Francisco’s salubrious Russian Hill neighbourhood with spectacular views across the entire Bay Area. A garden filled with ancient olive trees, a Norwegian stone infinity pool, a glass elevator linking all four floors with three bedrooms, a two-storey art gallery, wellness centre and an underground garage for four cars displayed on turntables.

The undulating structure, built by Dutch engineering firm Mecanoo and inspired by the undulating canopy of local banyan trees, incorporates a 2,236-seat opera house, a 1,981-seat concert hall, a 1,210-seat playhouse, a 434-seat recital hall, and an outdoor theatre built into the sloping roof.

Behold: Treow Brycg House at Kingsburg Beach on the south coast of Nova Scotia – a brooding structure redolent of some futuristic military installation but actually modelled on the vernacular gambrel-roofed barns of the area.

Designed both to resist and embrace the unpredictable coastal climate and control solar gain, the steel-walled house – on two levels with a separate interstitial zone for circulation – is slatted with brise soleils and clad in darkened aluminium.

The spiny ‘pavilion’ – whose construction, in essence, combines the properties of a solid shape and a shape-shifting fluid – was made by pouring the strangely familiar plastic shapes into a 8.8m x 9.7m enclosed space containing balloons (to create the negative space) which were then deflated and removed.

Behold: the sumptuous interiors of the Delphi Lux cinema in Berlin’s City West district – an extensive foyer, two bars and seating for 600 in seven different auditoria, each one branded with its own combination of LED lighting and geometric decor.